Too Much Chocolate

Our next open mic happens just after Easter and the theme will be ‘Too Much Chocolate’.

Chocolate contains cocoa, sugar, palm oil and milk (cattle), four ingredients that are responsible for huge tracts of primary rain-forest being destroyed across the globe. I thought this poem should represent the voices of forests and their inhabitants. I make no apologies for the last line.

Too Much Chocolate

Last week we heard a distant roar
that drifted on the air,
it crept ever closer
and bought with it despair.

The pillars are still falling
and all around us now
the constant whine of chainsaw
lays our forest bare.

You'll turn it into pasture
or cover it in palm.
Drag away the timber
to turn into a barn.

In places you'll plant cocoa,
where it shouldn't really grow
and it will leach the soil
and the insects they will go.

Then the birds that feed upon them
and the plants they pollinate
will vanish in a moment
from the hell that you'll create.

This Easter as you celebrate
the life that was reborn,
remember us, I beg,
for you decimate our forest
for a f***ing chocolate egg.

John Carré Buchanan
08 April 2017